Hut site, Killynan, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killynan, Co. Westmeath

Tucked into the grounds of a former landed estate in County Westmeath, a low earthwork sits on a natural ridge with the quiet indifference of something very old that has simply outlasted everything built around it.

What makes this particular spot unusual is the combination of two distinct features pressed close together: a D-shaped enclosure, its straight northern edge raised slightly above the surrounding ground and defined by a low earthen bank, and a small hut site adjoining it midway along that same northern bank. The enclosure wall itself does double duty, forming one edge of the hut site. A possible entrance opens to the north. These are not dramatic earthworks; the bank is low, denuded along the southern edge, and easy to overlook. That understatement is part of what makes the archaeology here worth attending to.

The site lies on the north-western side of what the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, marks as a deerpark, the enclosed hunting ground of a great house. That house is Killynan, and the associated castle and demesne have their own separate place in the archaeological record. The deerpark itself was bounded by a stone wall, and the hut site and enclosure sit within that boundary. A field inspection in 1986 confirmed the monument's significance, and it was added to the Register of Historic Monuments the following year, listed formally as an enclosure and hut site. The relationship between the ancient enclosure and the later designed landscape of the deerpark is one of those quiet ironies that occur throughout Irish archaeology: a structure predating any notion of managed parkland, absorbed into it, and surviving it.

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Pete F
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